TEI: P5 Guidelines

P5, the current version of the TEI Guidelines, was officially released on November 1, 2007 and since then has had maintenance and feature enhancement releases every six months. P5 is a major revision of the Guidelines that offers many new and improved features. Although P5 is very different from P4, both in its technical details and in many of its encoding provisions, migration from P4 to P5 will be largely automatable using readily available tools. The TEI provides information and advice on migration, and has also established a page on the TEI wiki where TEI users can contribute migration tools and stylesheets.

You can read the online version of the P5 Guidelines, purchase printed and bound copies from Omnipress, download the PDF, EPUB, or MOBI versions, or download the schemas, source files, documentation, etc. as a zip package from the TEI SourceForge site; more detailed instructions for accessing and using these materials are also available. The Roma customization tool can help you through the process of creating a customized TEI schema. More detailed information about using Roma is also available.

Major changes in P5

P5 provides important new encoding features, including
  • new support for manuscript description, multimedia and graphics, standoff annotation, and representation of data pertaining to people and places
  • improvements to elements like <sic> and <corr> to provide more powerful methods of encoding textual alternatives
  • changes to the way that linking mechanisms are expressed, so that pointing to other documents will be easier
  • major changes in the handling of languages and character sets
P5 also takes advantage of the power of XML schema languages, so that TEI users can now
  • reference other XML tagsets, such as MathML, from within a TEI document
  • embed TEI text within other types of XML documents, such as METS and MODS records
  • perform more rigorous validation (to ensure, for example, that the value of a @when attribute really is a date)
  • create and maintain user customizations more easily

Previous Releases of P5

The TEI Guidelines are stored in the TEI Sourceforge Subversion Repository which allows people to trace when and where any specific changes were made. However, since the TEI provides maintenance and feature improvement releases every six months, for convenience these are archived as a whole in the TEI Vault. One of the benefits of this is it allows you to consult the reference documentation or schema for the version of the TEI that your project has adopted. For example: This means, for example, that you can compare the current version of a TEI element to an earlier version, or use a TEI schema from a particular release rather than the most recent. One could do most of this with the TEI Sourceforge SVN site, but this organises it nicely on a release-by-release basis and includes the rendered versions of the Guidelines.